Basu: Some quibble over a national ranking but why can't high-skilled African-Americans get hired?

Iowa State Rep. Deborah Berry of Waterloo served 14 years in the Legislature before deciding to step aside and do something else. She had a master's in mass communications from the University of Northern Iowa, was one of the longest-serving African-American legislators in Iowa history, and was inducted into Iowa's African-American Hall of Fame.

But that wasn't enough to land her a job in her hometown, though she applied for many. She even had a six-hour interview for an alumni relations position but was told she did poorly in a role-playing exercise simulating contacting alumni for donations.

The repeated rejections left Berry, 60, doubting herself, sinking into depression and on the verge of leaving town. She saw many other educated black men and women meet the same fate, as positions went to less qualified white people. "There's something going on here," she said.

That something was the subject of a report released last month from “24/7 Wall Street,” an online financial news and opinion site in New York. "No U.S. metro area has larger social and economic disparities along racial lines than Waterloo-Cedar Falls, Iowa," it said.

Among its findings: The median household incomes of blacks in the region ($25,897 a year) were less than half (46.8 percent) of whites. While white unemployment was 4.4 percent, black unemployment is 23.9 percent, 10 points higher even than the national black unemployment rate.

Some of the data was out of date, according to a Des Moines Register report, which found in 2017, black unemployment was 10 percent and the median black household income was $28,000, but $55,000 for whites. But the gaps are still appalling. Black people number 12,085, or 7.1 percent of the region, yet only a third own their homes, compared to 73 percent of whites who do.

Loading...

How could a metro in a progressive Midwestern state like Iowa be worse off than the former slave-owning Deep South? Reactions to the report from the black community are mixed. Abraham Funchess, executive director of the Waterloo office of human rights, sees enduring institutional racism. He says despite training and outreach efforts, black people still aren't getting jobs. Since 2010, his office has recovered almost $2 million in compensation to victims of discrimination.

But one woman suggested to Berry the report was orchestrated to get black people to leave. Several others question how Waterloo-Cedar Falls came to head a list it didn't even appear on two years earlier, especially since Waterloo three years ago elected its first black mayor, Quentin Hart. He initiated job programs, economic summits and "listening posts," among other things. "I won't tell you we don't have problems," he said, "but we're doing more now than we ever have."

Cedar Falls Mayor Jim Brown criticized the report for lumping Cedar Falls and Waterloo together to meet a population threshold, saying, "We're two cities with two distinct sets of challenges." He said Cedar Falls has record low unemployment and he doesn't hear much about racial disparities. "Our minority make-up is different," he said referring to university affiliation.

Coincidence? Not likely

You can quibble over the numbers, but when even educated, experienced leaders like Berry are shut out of the workplace, it can't be coincidence. "You go to school," she said. "You get student loans. If you can't get a decent enough job and pay your loans, then what?" She is now president and CEO of KBBG-FM, a black radio station in Waterloo. She hosts a talk show, which recently tackled the topic.

One guest, John Berry (no relation), has a Ph.D. and was a vice president at a Florida university, yet it took him a year and a half to find employment in Waterloo. He's now executive director and CEO of Tri-County Head Start. "When you are constantly marginalized, it does something to your psyche," he said.

Waterloo has had a challenging history of segregation that has hurt its African-American community, notes Betty Andrews, president of the Iowa-Nebraska NAACP. In 1910 and again in the 1940s, black workers were brought in to replace strikers, first on the railroad and then at the Rath meat plant. They were relegated to Waterloo's east side, a segregation that endures. A 1967 report in the Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier cited housing bias, school segregation, and unequal employment.

Buy Photo

Waterloo resident Doris Dedrick said she has been pulled over multiple times by police, and felt targeted because of her race.(Photo: Michael Zamora/The Register)

"But it also has a lot of great community leaders and people who want to see the community grow and flourish," Andrews said.

Could part of the problem be that Waterloo-Cedar Falls, unlike the U.S. South, lacks a sizable black middle class? Joshua Barr thinks so. The South Carolina native heads Des Moines' civil and human rights department, and says an educated group that knows how the system works can advocate for the rest. He focuses on skills training that moves more people from low-wage to mid-skilled jobs, which are short of workers, and incubator programs to grow small businesses.

Even if Waterloo-Cedar Falls isn't No. 1 but No. 10 in disparities, and some black workers need more skills training, a gulf between black and white well-being that crosses skills lines can't be explained without addressing racism. That's not the fault of the mayor or any organization trying to make things better. Yet one of the insidious things about prejudice is how its victims feel the blame.

Could it be that Berry's performance on that role-playing exercise wasn't the problem, but those doing the hiring didn't think alumni would as readily open their wallets to a black woman? Did they end up perpetuating the racism they anticipated?

Waterloo has been recognized as bird-friendly, tree-friendly, green, and the 35th best place of it size for business careers. But if an entire population in the larger metro area is locked out of equal access to the American dream, the whole community suffers. Leaders across the spectrum and even across the state should hold up the report as a call to action. Every institution should be re-examining its attitudes, policies and practices for ways to be more inclusive.

Contact: rbasu@dmreg.com Follow her on Twitter @rekhabasu and at Facebook.com/rekha.basu1106. Her book, "Finding Her Voice: A collection of Des Moines Register columns about women's struggles and triumphs in the Midwest," is available at ShopDMRegister.com/FindingHerVoice.